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In a 1994 review of the 0.9 version of Netscape’s browser (then known as Mosaic Netscape), David Brody wrote: It’s also worth noting that prior to 1995, browsing the web was painfully slow - so even supporting the downloading of images was a big deal. The Mosaic team went ahead and added this functionality to their browser later in 1993, although the img tag wasn’t included in the W3C’s HTML specification until November 1995. Marc Andreessen’s February 1993 email to the But Andreessen wanted inline images that would sit alongside text. This was just a month after the initial release of Netscape’s predecessor, Mosaic - which Andreessen had co-created and was among the very first graphical web browsers. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen had already signaled his interest in adding multimedia elements to HTML as early as February 1993, with his suggestion to add an image tag to the specification.
![netscape navigator 1.0 netscape navigator 1.0](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WlljD5BkoHw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Given its origins as a graphical web browser, it was clear from the start what Netscape wanted to bring to the web: multimedia. But Netscape was founded as a commercial operation (one of the web’s first) and it needed to find a way to provide added value to the nascent world wide web community. HTML was great for what it enabled - text documents presented to internet users inside a web browser. Netscape Navigator 1.0 in 1994 via Aldo Computers 1993-94: Back History of JavaScript As Adrian Roselli put it, version 1.0 “pre-dated frames, cookies, HTML tables (support came in 1.1), JavaScript, and support for any of the robust features of HTTP.” In other words: Netscape Navigator 1.0 supported HTML markup, but not much more than that. There was zero interactivity and support for the web standards of the day was patchy.
![netscape navigator 1.0 netscape navigator 1.0](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/1801623/642px-Netscape_Navigator.png)
Netscape Navigator 1.0 had only just been released in December 1994. It’s hard to picture it now, twenty-five years after the fact, but at the start of 1995 web browsers had limited functionality. JavaScript ended up being the solution and this post explores how that came to be. In particular, Netscape wanted to add interactivity to websites. The project was initiated by Netscape because of a desire to extend the early Web beyond the limits of HTML, the declarative markup language that web pages are written in. JavaScript was invented in a two-week flurry in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, at the time a newly hired developer at browser company Netscape.